Phil Dunne's Tapes

The listening room

Phil Dunne started his career as a recording engineer in the late 1960s and was based first at Advision with the late Roger Cameron, then at the Marquee Studios where he met and started working with Gus. This partnership led to the building of The Mill studios.

Like many in the industry Phil made tape copies of interesting or unique sessions and kept them for his own reference. He eventually amassed two boxes of about 85 reels in total covering roughly the decade between 1968 to 1978.

Over recent years Phil had been trying to get somebody to help him play back these tapes contained in two house removal boxes. In October 2016 we had the pleasure of Phil's company for a couple of weeks. Using a hastily built playback room at my home, we spent over a week going through all the tapes, cleaning them, baking some, mending the dried out splices on some, and finally listening to them whilst I copied them onto a computer.

As we listened to each tape I took notes as Phil tried to remember any details of the sessions and these notes have been copied into each artist's page below, although there are still a few that Phil had no idea of who they were or when they were recorded. After all it was 40 to 50 years ago that these tapes were recorded.

We also don't know if the tapes which include released album tracks, are indeed identical to the finished album tracks so I have added the track duration in each case just for comparison purposes.

There are quite a few unknown tracks and artists left in this collection which I would appreciate any help with identifying if possible. The artists with unknown titles in their collections have an asterisk next to their name below, whilst the more curious can scroll down to the "Completely Unknown Tapes" (which I have carefully avoided making up an acronym for) and see if anything contained there is recognisable. Please let me know if you can identify the artist or title in any of the tracks and I will update the details on here.

Transcription details

All tapes were copied using a Teac A3300SX tape machine feeding directly into a Creative Audigy 2 Platinum EX soundcard sampling at 44.1kHz and 16 bit depth. No analogue compression was used and all tracks were copied straight without any effects. No tapes had any Dolby tones or notes to say they were encoded with Dolby A.

The above samples were each normalised to obtain maximum level before encoding.

AAC digital data compression has been applied to the samples, using the Fraunhofer FDK AAC codec at 64kb/s.

Monitoring and checking was carried out using a calibrated Totalsystems SPA-2 professional pre-amplifier feeding Alesis M1 MkII active stereo monitors.